The Rules of Play

THE

RULES

OF

PLAY

ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

Days and Nights in W12

The Very Man
Paleface
The Age of Cardboard and String

JENNIE WALKER

© 2008 by Jennie Walker. All rights reserved.

First published in Great Britain as “24 for 3”
by CB Editions, 2007

Published in Great Britain by Bloomsbury Publishing in 2008

Published in the United States in 2010 by

Soho Press, Inc.
853 Broadway
New York, NY 10003

Extract from Chekov’s
Sakhalin Island
, Oneworld Classics,
2007, reproduced with permission.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Walker, Jennie, 1951-
[24 for 3]
The rules of play / Jennie Walker.

p. cm.

Originally published as: 24 for 3. London : Bloomsbury, 2008.
ISBN 978-1-56947-625-3 (hardcover)
1. Test matches (Cricket)—England—Fiction. 2. Triangles (Interpersonal relations)—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6052.O9196A12 2010
823.92—dc22

2009031242

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Catherine

THE

RULES

OF

PLAY

Contents

Friday

Saturday

Sunday

Monday

Tuesday

Friday
| Saturday | Sunday | Monday | Tuesday

'F
ive
days
?’

All I’ve done is walk back into the bedroom and ask who is winning. He tells me to lie down. He tells me that this is a natural question but not the right one. Today is Friday, the match lasts until Tuesday evening, they’ve been playing for only two hours and no one can tell right now who is winning. But England are doing pretty well, considering their injury problems. He asks if I’d rather make love for ninety minutes or for five days.

The players troop off the field to have lunch. None of them looks injured to me, they aren’t limping or on crutches. He switches off the TV and looks at me, gathering himself.

‘The latter,’ I say, then think what this means. ‘Is there time out for sleeping? Eating?’

‘And shitting,’ he says. ‘But these breaks, they aren’t long.’

‘Reading?’

‘Only aloud. A pleasure shared.’

‘Then yes, the latter.’ This is a different time-scale than I had imagined.

‘Good,’ he says. ‘I feel that way too.’

He tells me it’s a game involving many different skills and a lot of patience. Although there are times when outright aggression is exactly the right attitude. He tells me it can be affected by external factors: the weather, for instance, and not just when it rains—if there’s moisture in the atmosphere the ball comes through the air in different ways, it swings or turns and the bowler can more easily deceive the batter. Or the condition of the ground, whether it’s hard or soft or downright muddy. Or personal rivalries. Or delays on the Tube, or which side of the bed. Experience is good, but sometimes the rookies can do better than the older ones. They have nothing to lose.

‘I have a lot to lose.’

‘Don’t let it change the way you play.’

‘That’s going to be hard.’

‘Why else would you be here?’

I gasp, because he has just touched me exactly where I didn’t know I was wanting him to. Then he moves away, to leave me guessing where next.

It’s a team game, he tells me. Every player has others with them, people they either like or don’t like but they’re there, in the team, and they depend on one another. Although often the whole game is changed by an individual performance. A lot of decisions have to be made, both considered ones, after weighing the pros and cons, and ones for which you have less than an instant of time, a blink of an eyelid. Mistakes are made. Not infrequently, the players feel that the game is unfair.

‘Like life,’ I say, pointlessly.

He shakes his head. At least, I think he does. Because we’re lying side by side and speaking to the ceiling, I can’t see, but there’s a movement of the pillow, a tiny change of atmospheric pressure.

‘Life is life,’ he says. ‘Cricket’s only a game.’

‘So tell me the rules.’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I doubt that explaining things does any good.’

He sounds defensive, which is interesting. ‘You’re just being lazy.’

‘No. Explanations always make things more complicated than they really are. They get in the way.’

‘You mean,
seem
more complicated than they are.’ Such a good time, after making love, to worry about definitions, when they don’t matter a bit. A fuck.

‘Perhaps.’

‘And if you know the rules and I don’t, how can I—’ ‘You wouldn’t explain a joke, would you? It would kill it.’

‘Is cricket a joke?’

‘Depends how you tell it.’

‘A long one. You have to wait five days for the punchline.’

‘It isn’t a joke. But nor is love. Explanations are pointless.’

We consider this, separately and together, looking up at the ceiling.

Then he says, ‘Isn’t mystery better? Not knowing all the answers?’

‘That’s a cheap line.’ I slap him, harder than I’d intended, somewhere on his chest. ‘At least tell me who’s playing?’

‘England are bowling, India are batting. According to the betting shops, India will probably win.’

For all the time I have lived in England, during my so-called adult life, it seems that the English have been losing. And yet they go into each game with such gleeful enthusiasm, wagging their tails.

‘And who are the two people wearing coats who stand very still?’

The odd couple: a bloated red-faced one and a small, wiry, dark-skinned one. These are the umpires, he tells me. When no one can agree about anything—whether the sky is too dark or the rain is too heavy, whether the ball is round or not round, whether a man is dead or still alive—the umpires decide. They know all the rules. They know more rules than are in the book. They stop any cheating. The bloated one is wearing a white hat with a wide brim that would look good at a wedding.

THIS IS MY lover who is speaking, my lover of only three months and one week so I am happy to listen to whatever he is saying, for the sound of his voice.

I interrupt him only to keep him going, to give him something to work with. His voice is steady and calm and lovely but not rational at all. Anything could come next.

‘82 for 3,’ he says. ‘Not a bad morning.’

For me too it was good. Every part of me, inside and out, has been alive, and still is. His fingers are drifting on my skin, a lazy whisper. He’s left-handed. His right hand is tucked somewhere between us, useless, for now. He doesn’t know my body as well as, hasn’t known it for so long as, for example, my husband. Not that
long
equals
well
, but that’s the convention and he observes the conventions, watchfully, politely, with those very light fingers. You could say that given what we now know about each other, and what we’ve done to each other, politeness is superfluous, but I disagree.

He doesn’t sweat and mine has dried on me, still there, a film. Inner thighs, teasing, flat of my belly and he wants me to turn over, I know he does, his right hand is coming into play, but right now seems too soon. Later—the luxury of that. Either that or I’m testing his want: it
is
a game, isn’t it?

‘I thought this was supposed to be one of the breaks,’ I say.

I get up from the bed and walk to the window. This is a mansion flat, on the fourth floor, above the height of the trees that separate this building from the similar adjacent one, so I have to stand to one side of the window and look aslant to see any greenery, any other life. There is nothing outside to hold my interest, and nothing in this bedroom too, other than that man on the bed, and we both know it. Striped wallpaper, pale mauve, a small candelabra, fitted cupboards, the TV balanced on a chair. Beyond, in the large living room, there is more to distract: books, on the shelves and in piles around his desk, and photographs on the wall of people at table or posed at some formal gathering; no special or repeated woman’s face, I have looked. And she would, by now, have been spoken of, if relevant. Except for the books on the floor the whole flat is impersonal, male, slightly dusty; like a hotel room that the cleaners haven’t been allowed into for two weeks.
Do Not Disturb
on the door. It belongs in a certain tradition: I have been, in company, in places like this before, without ever undressing or staying beyond dinner.

And it’s unheated, naturally. I come back to the bed.

He wants me to stay for the afternoon session but I have to go.

It’s me that’s cheating.

I have very little knowledge of tradition, other than that it comes from a Latin word meaning ‘surrender,’ and even less of the rules, but I adore this man.

I stay for the afternoon session.

WHEN I GET home Alan is in the kitchen wearing his best apron, the one with stripes, like butchers used to wear and some still do, and just for a moment, as I stand in the kitchen doorway, that’s how I see him—legs splayed, right arm holding a cleaver at shoulder height, about to bring down the blade on a hapless chunk of raw meat.

But no, dicing vegetables and measuring a teaspoonful of this and half one of that is more Alan’s style. He’s got his reading glasses on and a recipe book propped against the radio.

‘I hope you’re feeling hungry,’ he says.

I suggest that maybe his apron needs a wash, and he looks at me over his glasses to assess my mood. It wasn’t generous, what I said.

‘How do you spell fuchsia?’ asks Agnieszka, sitting at the kitchen table with a crossword and a shiny gold pen.

‘F—u—s—c—h—i—a,’ says Alan.

He’s got the
s
in the wrong place, I think. It’s not worth correcting. On the other hand, Agnieszka trusts him on things like this, and it could mess up her whole crossword. On the third hand, with a name like hers you’d think she’d be good at spelling.

Why am I in this mood? This day has been to die for. ‘Where’s Selwyn?’ I ask.

‘It’s not as hard as it seems,’ Alan says. ‘It never is. Fuss-cha.’

Crosswords are recent. Agnieszka does them with Harvey, her new boyfriend, or friend. He buys the
Telegraph
and uses the photocopier at the college to make a copy of the crossword, which she brings home. He claims it’s good for her English. Harvey she hasn’t yet brought home, or I’d have known. She introduced me to him last week, when I met them in the street, another odd couple. He’s a shambling, awkward giant who moves with extreme caution, to avoid knocking things over. He has receding hair and wears highly polished brown shoes. He lives with his mother. He sucks mints. He has difficulty with making eye contact. He is both a child and in late middle-age. He’s twenty-five years old and has been, maybe still is, married—this seemed unlikely to Agnieszka when he told her, but on the other hand she doesn’t think he’s a person who makes things up. He’s honest, and he’s kind. When he went with Agnieszka to a party he brought along a dozen cans of soup—he had a lifetime’s supply of soup, he said, twelve cans was nothing. So maybe he does make things up.

‘You don’t like Harvey, do you?’ Agnieszka asked me later that day. Each new boyfriend she offers to me, as a cat would a mouse, and every time I have to resist the impulse to pick him up by his tail and throw him over the fence.

‘I do like him. He’s very . . . ’

‘English!’

‘Yes, I suppose. English. 1950s, maybe.’ When I think of him I see him in black and white, not color. He doesn’t eat enough fruit.

‘Old-fashioned, yes, he opens the door. And he is very kind, always giving me things. And with Harvey, my English too is better.’

As though being good at English is something you pass on, like a disease. Something that rubs off, skin to skin. She’s probably right.

‘Agnieszka,’ I told her, ‘there’s nothing wrong with your English. If you like him, fine, but you shouldn’t be spending time with him just to get free English lessons.’

‘No, no, it’s not good. I have problem with tenses, especially conditional tenses, he noticed this.
If
clauses.’

‘It’s perfect, Agnieszka.’

She looked puzzled.

‘I mean, for you. For who you are. Look, you’ve been here how many years?—nine, ten?—and you’ve found your voice, the English you speak is you. Some vocab, maybe. But really if you stay here another ten years—’

‘Find husband, a dog, perhaps children—’

‘A job?’

‘A
dog
. You see?’

‘This is how you’ll still be speaking. Grandchildren, even.’

Utter dismay. ‘I have reached my peak?’

She’s twenty-seven. She is lovely. Except that she should have better than Harvey, I was making a mess of this.

Shocked, hurt, she made a pose like a woman in a Communist poster. The future, the five-year plan.

‘I don’t think so,’ she said, very proud.

NOW ALAN IS putting a dish in the oven. ‘Forty-five minutes,’ he says, looking at his watch. He takes off his apron, hangs it on the back of the door, and heads for the living room. ‘Seven-fifteen, the highlights. You two stay and natter. It’ll be ready at eight.’

‘Highlights?’ says Agnieszka, puzzled, wondering why Alan wants to watch a programme about hairdressing.

‘The cricket,’ says Alan, turning on the TV. ‘First day. India all out for only 198 and we’re already 64 for 1. That’s a lot of wickets for the first day. England are doing pretty well.’ He’s almost rubbing his hands. I can smell the garlic.

‘Despite their injury problems.’

He stares at me, amazed.

Agnieszka, recognising a tone in my voice that makes her uneasy, says she’s got homework and scuttles upstairs.

‘Do you know where Selwyn is?’ I ask as she disappears.

I shrug, and sit beside Alan on the sofa.

What we are watching is a foreign film, without subtitles. I remind myself that I should not be trying to work out who is winning, because that is not the right question, but even so the storyline seems jerky and lacking any realistic motivation. Perhaps because this is the abridged version. The ball is flung at high speed towards the batter, who either hits it or misses it, and occasionally everyone leaps in the air and one of the umpires either pretends he hasn’t noticed or makes a rude gesture towards the batter.

‘He’s not going to stop it now,’ says the commentator. ‘The ball goes over the rope and that’s four runs. Vaughan will have to think about posting a third man.’ Idiot. He must be blind. There already is a third man: it’s Selwyn.

After fifteen minutes there is a break for ads and I turn towards Alan.

‘Tell me,’ I say to him quietly, ‘what is happening.’

Alan’s eyes swivel from front to side and back to the screen.

‘I mean it, Alan. Either you explain this game to me or I’m going to be asking lots of silly questions and you’ll get
very
annoyed. Really, it’s for your own good.’

‘Why now? There’s been cricket since, oh, since 1066.’

‘Why now? Because now I want to learn. I think.’

‘Since before we married.’

‘We’re still married.’

‘Okay.’ He makes a familiar gesture: he locks his hands and pushes them out in front of him with the palms outwards and his fingers tensed. His wedding ring is partly obscured.

‘This goes on for five days, doesn’t it?’

‘I said okay.’ The highlights have resumed. ‘Over supper.’

For a brief moment the camera turns to the scoreboard, a cluster of numbers like Sudoku but one stands out: ‘Last man: 8.’ On what scale? If 1 to 10 then he must have been good; was it just that someone better came along?